Singurătatea artistului

 

What Great Artists Need: Solitude by Joe Fassler

He had no discipline in his personal life—I do—but he had extreme discipline when it came to his art and the way he ran his life around it.

For the last 25 years of his life, he was married to the same woman, and the chaos of his life had settled. He lived on a small island called Faro, north of Gotland, where he would plan his films, write the scripts, make the screenboards, and everything. He limited his activities: Besides working and thinking, he might go for a stroll. He would only drink buttered skim milk, and have one cookie in the afternoon—his ailing stomach couldn’t take more than that. In the late afternoon or evening, he would have visitors over to go and look at a movie in his cinema. And that was his routine, every day. He didn’t try to do more.

That’s pretty disciplined to me—living primarily in service to one’s art. But we also hear the other myth: that you must live yourself out.